Selected Works

Michael Gorban was born in 1956 in the former Soviet Union.
In 1976, Gorban graduated from the Kishinev Higher School for the Painting Arts in Moldavia and in 1982, he graduated from the Academy for Painting in the city of Lvov, majoring in graphics. Gorban received a grant in 1988-1990 from the Artist’s Association of the Soviet Union.

He studied art for 21 years with the finest of Russian artists and by age 30 his paintings were hanging alongside those of Dali, Kandinsky, and Chagall in the prestigious Hermitage museum in Leningrad.
In 1990 Gorban left everything behind and emigrated to Israel. Today he is considered a first-rate Israeli artist, as well as being prominently featured with three of his paintings in the national album of Russian art history as one of the young artists to impact the 20th century between 1960 and 1980.

“Painting is a sensual experience,” claims Gorban from his studio near Tel Aviv. I will not sign my name until I am completely satisfied…. I have never painted under duress or according to order. My success comes from people feeling the same satisfaction that I myself felt upon completing the painting.”

The expanses of Michael Gorban’s descriptive imaging are boundless. His paintings sail between the artistic experience of the renaissance period and that of the 19th or 21st centuries. His superb representational talents, not limited to the space of actuality, and his imagination, charged by his personal experience and childhood memories of Russia, open before us a broad arc of images with individual, subjective meanings.

They are constructed out of an artistic language well versed in academic painting’s secrets of precision and knowing how to make awe-inspiring use of them. Michael Gorban creates series of paintings featuring subjects such as chairs, windows, music, and so forth. His intensive activity spawns about five one-man shows a year, exhibited mainly in the USA and Japan.